1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a method and apparatus for writing data to non-volatile memory and in particular to a method and apparatus for writing data to flash memory in order to ensure the uniform distribution of use over a prolonged period of operation.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In known memory systems it is common for non-volatile memory such as the flash memory of the memory systems to have wear out mechanisms within their physical structures, i.e. a block within the flash memory may experience failure after a cumulative number of operations. However, known data management methods typically do not perform block erasure in Flash memory in real time leading to the accumulation of blocks in Flash memory which include obsolete versions of sectors. It is also the case that in known systems the physical address for writing a sector is dependent on the logical address of the sector thus logically non-contiguous sectors are written in non-contiguous physical address and logical to physical.
Thus, a need arises to obviate or mitigate at least one of the aforementioned problems.